Giffords Shot: Now, A Word from Our Gun Control Sponsors…

The shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords provided an opportunity for Brady Campaign president Paul Helmke to promote more gun control. "[W]e can and should do more," he said, "to address the easy access to high-powered guns that make it too easy for dangerous and irresponsible people to disrupt and destroy the lives of innocent Americans [...]."

By comparison, Hitler, another gun control proponent, murdered “only” 21 million civilians. But perhaps had the Nazis had as many years as the Marxists, they would have been more “successful.”

If one deranged murderer killed six people a day, as happened in Tucson, it would take mass murderers 74,441 years to match what the acolytes of Marx and Hitler did in decades.

The FBI reported 15,241 murders for 2009. The murder rate has declined 46.8% since 1990, and the number of murders declined by 35%. Ignoring this and assuming that murders stabilize, it would still take over 10,696 years to match the socialists. (Remember that “Nazi” stands for “National Socialist German Workers' Party.”)

The argument is made that if only we had banned guns like Britain and Australia, this wouldn’t have happened.

In 2009, 12 years after their gun ban, Australia experienced its worst mass murder in history, and no guns were involved:

The Australian prime minister accused arsonists of "mass murder" …. Officials in Victoria believe some of the 400 fires that reduced towns to blackened ruins may have been deliberately set, or have been helped to jump containment lines. The incinerated towns have been officially declared as crime scenes.

The 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission concluded that 173 people were murdered and some communities were “physically destroyed.” Property damage was estimated to be $1.2 billion; the government valued the deaths and injuries at another $645 million.

British doctor and serial killer Harold Shipman used no firearms in murdering what police estimate may be “between 215 and 260 people over a 23-year period.” Officials believe Shipman “enjoyed viewing the process of dying and enjoyed the feeling of control over life and death.” He treated the criminal investigation “as some sort of game, a competition, pitting his, what he considered to be his superior intellect, to those of the officers who were interviewing him.”

In 2002 -- five years after enacting its gun ban -- the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) acknowledged there was no correlation between gun control and the use of firearms in murder, but that “the percentage of homicides committed with a firearm continued its declining trend since 1969.”